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I do a lot of Steehead fishing on the Eel River and you would be amazed at how many cars are laying next to the river from where the forks meet all the way to Scotia. Most are covered by trees and bushes. There is a string of 3-4 near Holmes. I need to spend time on Google Earth and see if i can find them.

They definitely look like GS gondolas and I've seen pictures of them in rafting video/photo compilations. I second the stringline derailment and abandonment, since that quarter-mile or so of riverbed shelf appears stable enough not to consider car bodies for fill riprap.

Jeff Moore: I don't think those cars in this photo were deliberately ditched here. If so, wouldn't they have been embedded in the embankment? This area seems to be sheltered from the river. I'll wager that they were being pulled around that corner and stinglined over the edge. SP probably decided that they were too damaged to salvage and simply left them there.

Their placing very strongly suggests they were deliberately placed there to shore up the subgrade. This was actually a very common practice and an easy way to get rid of old cars...and not something unique to railroads, many years ago I was doing some school work on a ranch on the banks of the Mad River a little east of Arcata, the rancher told us most of the riverbank through their property had been "stabilized" decades ago by junked out '50s era automobiles.

On a similar vein, the breakwater fill just south of Eureka and north of the old nuclear power plant is built on a lot of old raicar bodies, if you"surf" that in Google Earth you can see several of them peaking out through the rubble.